Byju’s, an edtech company based in India that claims a $3.6 billion valuation based on its sales success there, announced it has acquired Palo Alto, CA-based learning-through-play firm Osmo for $120 million.Named after the teacher Byju Raveendran, who founded the company in 2011, Byju’s is making its first acquisition in the United States to advance its goals of expanding globally and adding very young children to its user base. The company, which announced the deal Wednesday, had already made ... Tags: Google, Deals, Startups, Mobile, Hardware, Education, Internet, Entrepreneurship, India, Funding, San Francisco, Trends, Tech, Web, It, Vc

ScoutRFP, whose software is designed to help businesses streamline the process of ordering goods from suppliers, announced that it raised $33 million in a Series C fundraising round led by Scale Venture Partners.San Francisco-based Scout, part of a tech sector dubbed supplier relations management, or SRM, aims to free businesses from painstaking traditional methods of seeking bids from various suppliers and comparing their merits. Some companies are still doing this by laboriously creating spre... Tags: Deals, Startups, Mobile, Cloud, Internet, Entrepreneurship, Funding, San Francisco, Trends, Tech, Web, It, Vc, Software, Automation, Innovation

When Propeller Health’s founders initially tried to raise funding for their new healthcare technology venture, many of the investors they spoke with were hesitant to take the risk.It was the early part of this decade, and Propeller was navigating the FDA’s regulatory process for medical devices. The company believed it had a chance to become one of the first to earn market clearance from the agency for a software product, says Propeller co-founder and CEO David Van Sickle. Propeller’s idea for ... Tags: Deals, Startups, Mobile, Apps, Internet Of Things, Education, Connected Devices, Trends, Tech, It, Cybersecurity, Walgreens, Vc, Software, Healthcare, M&a

Businesses racing faster and faster to put their data and applications into multiple cloud services will soon have to figure out how to keep an eye on it all. Start thinking about the hundreds of users, the dozens of accounts, and the handful of different cloud services that don’t always speak the same language, and the job of monitoring and securing it all quickly gets complicated.This is the problem that Brendan Hannigan and Sandy Bird are attacking with their New York-based company Sonrai Se... Tags: Google, Amazon, Deals, Startups, Open Source, Cloud, New York, Microsoft, Identity, Azure, Trends, Tech, Cisco, It, Cybersecurity, Vc

Diabetes drugs are Eli Lilly’s bread and butter, but the pharmaceutical giant hasn’t lost its appetite for cancer drugs. It grabbed hold of a few more this week by betting $8 billion on Loxo Oncology.Loxo (NASDAQ: LOXO) has made a name for itself by becoming one of just two companies ever to earn an FDA approval for a drug that targets a tumor’s DNA fingerprint, no matter where in the body that cancer is found. The drug, larotrectinib, targets rare tumor abnormalities known as NTRK fusions. The... Tags: Deals, Startups, Ipo, Cancer, Trends, Medicare, SEC, Fda, National, GlaxoSmithKline, Allergan, Shire, Biotech, Medical Device, Postpartum Depression, Bernie Sanders

A bunch of startups started 2019 off on the right foot taking big checks cut by investors that continue the boom from 2018. Read on for more.—Weather forecast company ClimaCell says its high-resolution data is now available in 40 countries, including India. In October, the Boston-based startup raised $45 million, pushing its total venture capital haul to $65 million, and since then, it added another $5 million from GXP Investments, an arm of Kansas power utility Great Plains Energy, and Nationa... Tags: Deals, Startups, Boston, India, Israel, Trends, Tech, Mit, Bill Gates, Venture Capital, Cambridge, Kansas, National Grid, Worcester, Affectiva, Wells Fargo

Venture capital investments rose in 2018 to levels not seen since the heady days of 2000, the last year U.S. startups collectively took in more than $100 billion.That’s according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association’s Venture Monitor report, released this week, which tallied nearly 9,000 deals made last year, through which venture investors sunk $130.9 billion into companies. That was about 500 fewer deals than in the year prior, but the total amount invested increased by $... Tags: Deals, Startups, Lyft, Uber, Entrepreneurship, Funding, Trends, Vc, Software, Pwc, Venture Capital, Angel, National, WeWork, Magic Leap, Biotech

2018 was a year of ups and downs for the business and technology community. It was a year of big exits—both IPOs and acquisitions—for tech and life sciences companies. Venture funding remained strong, but more money went to fewer (and later-stage) companies overall. As the year winds down, we’re reflecting on the big innovation trends and developments that will carry over to next year.Storylines in various sectors helped shape the overall narrative in 2018. Cell and gene therapies, cancer immun... Tags: Deals, Startups, Technology, Cloud Computing, Trends, Tech, IPOs, It, People, Cybersecurity, Analysis, Vc, Software, Bitcoin, Bill Gates, Innovation

In mid-2018, Tom Bogan was the leader of business planning software company Adaptive Insights as it planned its own next steps. The Palo Alto, CA-based company was on the point of raising about $115 million in a June IPO that would have set its market value at around $705 million, according to PitchBook.But like Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate,” the big enterprise software company Workday lured Adaptive Insights away from the IPO altar with a more attractive deal—a $1.55 billion acquisition off... Tags: Deals, Startups, Cloud, Internet, Entrepreneurship, Ipo, Funding, San Francisco, Trends, Tech, Web, It, Excel, Software, Data Science, Innovation